Advanced process control (APC) systems are presently used to predict process corrections for photolithographic devices (e.g. steppers, scanners and the like) by calculating overlay model parameters from various production lots of semiconductor devices. However, current methodologies for determining the performance of such APC systems may merely include analysis of such production lots. Using such methods may result in the consideration of errors introduced independently of the APC algorithms (e.g. tool errors, metrology errors, and the like). As such, an accurate measure of APC performance may be difficult to obtain from simple final production lot analysis. As such, a need exists to determine the relative performance of APC independent from other process variables.